Building a Developer Cult • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#71

Post by pg_bot » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

Adyen's pricing seems to be higher and way more confusing than Stripe's.[0][1]

AMEX and Discover's transaction costs are a percent higher on Adyen, and I can't actually tell what Mastercard or Visa will charge since it is obfuscated. The cherry on top is the FAQ at the bottom that describes what interchange++ is but doesn't actually tell you a range of fees that it can be. I guess it's cool to see in detail all the middle men taking a cut of my revenue, but I'm way more concerned about the actual amount that is being taken out ahead of time instead of it being a surprise for every transaction.

[0] https://www.adyen.com/pricing?navItem=northamerica [1] https://stripe.com/pricing

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#72

Post by netcan » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

Some realities manifest at different scales. Once you're in the largest tier, the "where is the money" reality affects things.

Large corporations are the larger, wealthier segment.

A big chunk of "startup business strategies" ignore this market. This makes a lot of sense for a startup. You don't really care what the bigger market is as a startup, you care what market is easier to access. Assuming the market is big (eg online payments), the size of the market isn't a limiting factor.

That works in-context. I'f you're trying to build a startup, landing a multi-year contract with a big company is a bad angle for multiple reasons. Not always, but mostly in the generic case. Long sales cycles. Checklist feature demands. Custom features. Besides being hard for most founders, it pushes in the wrong directions. Meanwhile, who cares if you're addressing a $3bn market or a $800bn market. Both of those are big enough for a startup aiming for $8m in revenue. Your problem is sucking and failure, not pyrrhic victories.

Also, if you are successful enough, small markets become big markets. When Google IPO-ed, they competed with yellow pages for mom-n-pop business & such.

OTOH, most of the market is large companies, governments, etc. That's reality, and it means something. Now that VCs fund startups so generously, a common pattern is bootstrapping in a shallow pond... then jumping into the main pond once you have momentum.

EG, Having a "developer cult" mentality, like stripe, at your base will serve you in the long term. Enterprise developers do have influence. It's never what makes a decision, but it can be a favourable wind.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#73

Post by jsnell » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

> Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage)

Actually looks like 43B EUR, so $50B.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#74

Post by tannhaeuser » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

It's been some time I've worked with web payments (back in 2003 or so when 3DSecure/UCAF was new which would bring up your card issuer's site in an iframe within your shop site, which still looked fishy), but I've always thought a payment infrastructure/comprehensive standard should be mandated by government, on similar legal grounds that a currency is issued in the first place, and for protecting access to the market (the EU already puts strong and maybe disproportionate reporting duties due to MiFid/MiFid2 for deposits, with unclear benefits). Though I'm not very sure, as a payment provider has to do costly things for fraud/money laundering/deposit protection.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#75

Post by rorykoehler » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

edwinwee wrote: post #52

arp242 wrote: post #22

I recently built a Stripe integration, and can't say I'm especially impressed. Unless I completely missed some aspects, it mostly just seems like an interface to their database. While this is great for some advanced workflows, the vast majority of use cases are all very similar: "create subscription and customer", "change subscription", etc. Common workflows require quite some coding, and there's no support for trans…

(Edwin from Stripe here.) Most people like our built-in search since it lets you quickly navigate and see related things. But if you don't, you can hit Ctrl+F+F to use native browser search. You can turn it off entirely by unchecking "Open on Ctrl-F." Docs now save to your cache, so loading should feel pretty immediate. What should we be more clear about in the Checkout docs? We're working on improving them, but it'd…

I just started implementing checkout in Rails on a side project and the step by step docs don't cover CORS and CSP. I get a bunch of errors. Really the docs should cover every little detail leaving nothing to be researched. Any time I follow a how to doc that leaves details out I lose flow which in turns slows me down and makes me less happy.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#76

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC

porker wrote: post #63

Silhouette wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remarkable thing about the culture around Stripe is that they still get the credit for the things they did well in those early days, even though they are far from the same service now that they've scaled up. Objectively, today's Stripe is often a relatively expensive and unreliable way to collect money from your customers. The API and developer documentation are no longer as simple and effective as they once were…

This is my experience too. > who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them. Which alternatives should I consider, if I need PSD2? I've written about my experience with Braintree above; there's SagePay but every client has been pleased to move away from them.

PSD2 implies Europe, so my first question is whether to accept cards as the primary means of payment at all. The various direct payment schemes are typically cheaper, more reliable and, in some countries, much more widely used. If you are handling recurring billing via a Direct Debit scheme then you are probably also outside the scope of the SCA rules that are going to interrupt payment flows using cards whenever the EU member states finally insist on following them.

I've used GoCardless to do some of this, but depending on where you are based, there seem to be quite a few other services now that offer some or all of the relevant schemes.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#77

Post by hrktb » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 9:30 AM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #51

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

When doing B2B with big corps developers opinion is not of such huge importance, they're not making any calls about closing the deal. Also integration will almost always be a part of the deal, so again devs care less, they'll have someone to come over and help set it up. It's in a big contrast with startups and small teams where it's usually up to devs to choose which payment processor will be used and how, and they'…

Developpers opinion doesn't matter much, but developpment cost and reliability does. If a project takes 6 months vs 3 weeks, it's a completely different game.

Even for big B2B corps, it's the difference between a project you can lead on your own and get credit for it, or something that will go upper in the chain because of all the approvals you need for it.

In a previous life, to get an Adyen contract and dev. environment and then the prod credentials, it took us something like 3 months, and we had a smaller PSP integrated for a different project in the meantime. That meant that for any project we didn't have as much volume, we'd go though faster PSPs instead of reusing the Adyen connection.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#78

Post by dewey » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

pg_bot wrote: post #71

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

Adyen's pricing seems to be higher and way more confusing than Stripe's.[0][1] AMEX and Discover's transaction costs are a percent higher on Adyen, and I can't actually tell what Mastercard or Visa will charge since it is obfuscated. The cherry on top is the FAQ at the bottom that describes what interchange++ is but doesn't actually tell you a range of fees that it can be. I guess it's cool to see in detail all the m…

I'd guess that with the bigger deals they are doing all these things are up for negotiation anyway so they might not need a slick landing page with a simple pricing that a developer can understand in a few minutes.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#79

Post by andy_ppp » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 9:40 AM UTC

pg_bot wrote: post #71

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

Adyen's pricing seems to be higher and way more confusing than Stripe's.[0][1] AMEX and Discover's transaction costs are a percent higher on Adyen, and I can't actually tell what Mastercard or Visa will charge since it is obfuscated. The cherry on top is the FAQ at the bottom that describes what interchange++ is but doesn't actually tell you a range of fees that it can be. I guess it's cool to see in detail all the m…

It basically is always cheaper for almost everything than Stripe (except AMEX). Interchange++ is always less than Stripe's equivalent charge (2.9% or lower for European cards) and 12¢ is less than 30¢.

The page I agree is confusing.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#80

Post by bojanz » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 9:43 AM UTC

debaserab2 wrote: post #14

There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life). People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they did…

I am sure many developers don't remember just how much crappier the "crappier APIs" were. Back when Stripe became popular the alternative was XML and SOAP, documented in an outdated PDF that would get emailed to you, or if you're lucky, hosted behind 3 login walls. Then, once you start integrating, you realize that their dev environment is offline every other request, and doesn't match the production environment. So you just do the work blindly and hope for the best.

Having a decent publicly documented API was revolutionary.